Okay, okay, I’m not doing well at vacationing. Whatever. More guest posts to come and I’m not reading anything but magazines right now (!), so this is really and truly the last post from me for a few weeks. Plus Of Mice and Men is a novella and takes a couple of hours to read, so there.
Read it for book club and we had a decent discussion of the representation of women, the moral messages of the novel (life is suffering, individual ambition is foolish, mercy and justice are tricky) and the origins of the title (from the Burns poem, and not – as I thought – a message about the equivalence of mice and men in the order of the universe (OR IS IT…). And then the discussion turned to how you rate (or recommend) a ‘classic.’ (In our book club we each rate the novel on a scale from one to ten). Is a novel like this one – so tight, so well wrought, so contained and yet impactful – exempt from such reviews? Should we just take as stiuplated that if a novel has endured and continues to offer such rich readings that it is as a matter of course worth reading and recommending?
I concluded that I wouldn’t recommend this one, not because it had any faults or was in any way objectionable to read (though the representation of women did raise some questions), but… why not? I guess for me it felt stodgy and slow and entirely concerned with being an impactful piece of literature (I’m loathe to consider it, but I suspect if I returned to my – once favourite – East of Eden I’d find the same to be true). It makes a great novel to teach literary ideas, or to strucutre a Unitarian sermon, but it falls short – for me – of inviting a novel perspective, or — and this is silly — being that much fun.
That said, it does provoke unconsidered questions and is masterfully crafted. So I’m hardly going to say don’t read it. More I’m curious how you approach classic works: do you take for granted that they are excellent? Do you find yourself predisposed to a positive reading because you ‘ought’ to be?
Literary Vice 